I had a couple Twitter conversations on how the GOP can significantly cripple the Democratics and gain some actual permanent wins. One single PAC spent $142 million on Romney and received nothing to show for it in the end. With that much money I could signficantly cripple the Dems and win the next decade or two for the Republicans.
Being a reactionary monarchist, I generally avoid partisan politics here, but I thought this would be an enjoyable intellectual exercise.
Since I’m in a generous mood, I’ve decided to share the basic strategy for the GOP to steal and use (or more likely ignore) however they want, but first a little groundwork.
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The most interesting fact about American politics is how the Republicans totally dominate all levels of violence, yet are always in a perpetual state of losing. The military is primarily Republican, the police are more split but, at least in terms of front-line workers, are generally Republican, and the NRA, while officially non-partisan, is primarily composed of Republicans. The vast majority of people who own and can use a gun are conservative, yet, in the long run, conservatives always lose to their weaker, unarmed brethren.
It is baffling until you realize it is because conservatives refuse to play by the rules the progressives have set. Democrats can steal bags of votes, implement gang-run politics, destroy crimethinker’s careers, and stage shit-ins (among many other things) with impunity and the Republicans refuse to respond with anything worse than requiring ID to vote (and then getting called evil when doing so).
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First, some theory. In “To Win a Nuclear War” Michio Kaku outlined the concept of ‘escalation dominance’.
Escalation dominance essentially means the actor controlling the highest level of violence (in the book’s case, nuclear weapons) can control all lower levels of violence by threatening to escalate the conflict to a higher level of violence. By controlling the tempo and threat of escalation, this actor can steer a conflict in such ways as to win lower level conflicts even in areas where he may be weaker.
As I stated above, the military, the police, and the NRA are conservative institutions. Conservatives, and thereby the Republican party, control the highest level of violence in American political disputes.
Using this, the Republicans should be able to control the escalation and tempo of lower-violence political conflicts.
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Note: This does not mean Republicans should start shooting Democrats. The primary point of escalation dominance is to control the lower levels of violence so you don’t have to escalate.
The primary reason for controlling nuclear weapons is not to use nuclear weapons. Controlling lower levels of violence without having to resort to using nuclear weapons through the implied threat of nuclear escalation is the purpose of nuclear weapons.
Controlling the highest level of violence in American politics means that Conservative can control the tempo of lower-violence political conflicts (voting, law-making, regulation enforcement, etc.) and control the escalation of political violence (ie: voting to voter fraud; debate to ideological firings) through the implied threat of further escalation (you witch hunt me and take my job, I witch hunt you and take your job and reputation; you escalate to assault, I escalate to shooting).
I repeat: I am not advocating shooting liberals or doing anything illegal. My strategy does not include physical violence or criminality. I am simply explaining a concept that will under-gird the strategy.
Also, for the purposes of this post any political act, whether it’s voting, protesting, debate, law-making, etc., will be considered a form of violence.
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Conservatives already have implied a willingness to escalate. “Cold dead hands” is pretty clear, the occasional fringe rant by people like Alex Jones shows that conservatives can be pushed too far, and liberals still bring up McVeigh and the abortion shootings from the 90’s.
So, the base has created a climate where the implication of escalation is clear. Republicans need to use this implied threat to control lower levels of violence so violence does not escalate, but they don’t.
Despite controlling the highest level of violence, Republicans are allowing the Democrats to set the tempo of escalation. In fact, Republicans are allowing the Democrats to escalate while never responding in kind.
This is why they lose. This is why they always lose.
If they want to win they need to match the Democrats escalation, then control the further tempo of escalation.
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Enough groundwork, now we get to the real stuff. Let’s say I had the $142-million Restore Our Future wasted on Romney or the $54-million American Crossroads used opposing Democrats. $142M over four years is $35.5M each year. Here’s how I’d spend $35M.
Create an information network. $3M*
Instead of wasting money on ads, support the dissemination over the internet. You can reach more people through FB than through some network cable slot. Create a network of cross-linking quasi-official aggregators of content and a quasi-official Republican news source.There are tons of young ideologues willing to do the Republicans propaganda grunt work for them for peanuts. Create a small fund to pay some of the best of them, say $25k each, to do it full-time. Create a small emergency fund for unpaid amateurs (your computer busted and you need a new one, here’s $1000, that kind of thing.) This could all be done for less than $1M. Easy enough.
Create an investigation network. $5M
Create a small fund (say $500k) that the aforementioned bloggers (or just regular Joes) can apply to have expenses paid for doing investigative work on a potential anti-leftist/Democrat lead.
Next, hire a couple dozen ideologically conservative reporters at $50k a piece (plus investigative expenses) and have their sole job to dig up and publish dirt on Democrats, Democrat supproters, liberals, liberal organizations, and the like. Have them work in concert with aforementioned information network.
Next hire a few dozen private investigators. Dedicate them to uncovering the personal information and secrets of leftists. Everybody has secrets they don’t want others to know; find it if possible. Do they cheat on their spouses or their taxes, do they look at weird or illegal pornography, any “emberassing” photographs or incidents in their past, any criminal actions in the past, etc. Have them find it.
Create a quasi-official Enemies List $200k
Create and maintain a database site that’s a catalogue of the the personal information of every remotely public Democrat, liberal, or anti-Republican person or organization. Keep it inside the realms legality of privacy laws, but absolutely no more than that. If it would give more latitude make it a private operation with no official ties to the party. It would include pictures, phone numbers, addresses, family, any wrongdoing or humiliating things from their past, etc.
Publish all the personal/organizational information gained from the investigation network on this list.
Create a legal war team. $20M
The leftists are engaging in lawfare, hit back but harder and more organized. Create two Republican legal firms (make them legally independent if need be).
Have one whose sole responsibility is defending any conservative/Republican who’s in trouble due to their politics (such as any troubles that may happen while enacting this plan). Make this firm small but top quality. Defend your own with the best.
Have a second firm that’s large, sacrifice on quality. Have this team find and bring to court any actionable lawsuits against Democrats, leftists, left-wing organizations, leftists’ businesses, etc. The purpose here is not to win, it is to use the courts as methods of persecution and to drag court cases out. Remember, in lawfare the trial is the punishment and you are looking to punish these people/organizations for being leftists. These cases can be anything; any kind of civil suit that can be concocted to be actionable.
Also, create a fund for paying the legal fees for cases that are lost and avoid cases that would get summarily thrown out.
Create a street team. $2M
As Kate always says, failing to show up for a riot is a failed conservative policy. Hire a bunch of young conservative/Republicans (at low wages) as organizers. Anytime leftists protest, the hired organizers would create a counter-protest. They would then organize their own protests. Do what leftists have learned; don’t protest in public streets, target. Is there a particular individual, protest in front of his house/place of employment for a week; is there an organization, protest outside the organization during the day, outside the home of the CEO/Director/Manager during the evenings. Remember, the leftists made the personal political.
Make sure to give clear instructions to avoid illegal actions and avoid stepping frmo “free speech” into “”harassment”.
Create a phone/e-mail team. $2M
Hire a few coordinators for different ideological areas to create a lists of volunteers. Every time it becomes necessary, have the coordinators coordinate a phone team. Have the each volunteer phone a leftist being targeted once a week (make the call polite: “Hi, sir, I would like to respectfully disagree with you or your organization’s policy on), but have enough volunteers that the person is getting a phone call every hour for the entire week. Keep this up for a few weeks. You are not phoning the PR people, you are not phoning secretaries, you are phoning these people directly. Get their numbers from above. Then have the volunteers phone their boss, the organization they volunteer with, etc. to register their displeasure.
Also, if there’s a leftist being targeted, have everybody e-mail bomb them and where they work registering displeasure.
Create an employment network. $300k
Spend a few hundred thousand to hire a few guys whose sole job is to help Republicans/conservatives who lose their jobs due to their ideology find new ones. One advantage the left has is that a leftist who does something leftist and stupid can always find employment with some leftist organization. Many conservatives don’t have that, so they are forced to curtail their political activities or hide behind screennames. All these guys have to do is find some Republican employers to participate, then link cosnervatives in need to them.
Hire a coordination office. $1M
Hire a coordinator to coordinator, and if necessary some office staff, to coordinate all these different teams.
Ad Hoc. $2M
A small fund for the coordinator to take advantage of any unforeseen opportunities that may present themselves.
With more, simply do all this, but bigger.
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With everything in place, have the coordinator run ruthless personal campaign after ruthless personal campaign.
Find a leftist and destroy him/her on a personal level. Targets can include actual elected officials, bureaucrats abusing their positions for partisan reasons (ie. the IRS), leftist bloggers, leftist media figures, leftist academics, leftist activists, leftist businesses, leftists NGO’s and non-profits.
The investigation network will find out everything they can about it, they will pass it to the information network who will distribute it, and it will be logged in the enemies list. If the pesron has done anything actionable, the legal war team will pounce on it. The street and phone team will protest in their own manners.
You could have dozens of these campaigns running at once.
For an example of how it could look, let’s go back to John Cook, who published the names of every gun owner in New York and let’s pretend this network is in place.
The investigation network would find his address, his personal phone number, pictures of his home and kids, his porn habits, his marriage therapy sessions, whatever they legally could find. The information network would distribute this widely. A dossier of him and his family would be written up on the enemies list. So, now everything about him is freely available on the internet.
The legal war team would find whatever arcane law or “injured” they could to make a civil action of this. They’d bring John to court personally and tie him up in months of legal battles. Every hour of every day for weeks, both him and his wife would receive a polite phone call from a different person expressing polite disapproval; their personal inboxes would load with polite e-mail expressing disapproval. His boss at Gawker would be receiving continual calls and e-mails to fire him.
A small group of (non-harassing) protesters would show up on the sidewalk outside his house in the morning as his children are leaving for school and in the evening as they are getting home from school, having dinner, going to bed. They’d be in front of his place of work during the day.
After a month of that peaceful, legal attack, do you think anybody would be stupid enough to try to publish gun owners name’s again. Even after the rather weak, uncoordinated response to John the alst time no one has since published another gun owners list. Now repeat that for every offending leftist, every offending organization, and the occasional random leftist, how long until the public action of the leftists can’t sustain itself anymore.
Without the constant leftist campaigns and organizations, the electoral support of leftists begins to whither over time. A few elections down the road, Republicans are consistently winning and getting their agenda through because most leftists are too cowed to fight back.
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Now, if you find this distasteful, remember, leftists are already doing this. They already fully agree that this is kind of personal action is acceptable practice. They’ve done it many times, and will continue to do it. The recent dust-up at Mozilla makes that clear. So, it is either respond in kind or lose.
Right now, the leftists have escalated to a higher level of political violence than the Republicans; the Republicans need to match it and escalate a step further.
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The obvious question then becomes, why won’t the leftists/Democrats organize, then escalate further?
They will, to which the Republicans respond by escalating again.
This is where we get to escalation dominance.
At some point of escalation, the left will be to afraid to escalate further, because the right controls the highest level of violence.
While the reaction to the Gawker story wasn’t enough to do more than irritate John Cook, a similar reaction to a similar piece in for a newspaper, resulted in the paper hiring armed guards.
Once the escalation has been pushed high enough, the left will blink at the implied threat of physical violence and then perhaps deescalation can occur.
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That’s the basic outline for a long-term win for the GOP.
If any higher placed GOP flak with the funds would like to win, win hard, and win permanently rather than throw massive amounts of money down the RINO-hole, I am willing to sell my services. I will gladly be hired to write up a detailed plan and I would be happy to be hired to implement it (for appropriate compensation of course). I might not believe in democracy, but Democrat tears are their own reward.
Also, my offer of selling my services applies to other country’s conservative parties. I do live in Canada after all.
Think about it GOP operative or rich conservative donor reading this. You can hire me for peanuts (relatively speaking) and win, or you can continue to throw millions upon millions at candidates that always seem to let the country continue left.
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For this strategy, I’ve stayed within the realm of legality.
Now the Democrats have already escalated into illegality through ballot-stuffing, voter fraud, voter intimidation, and gang politics. If certain GOP operatives were willing to escalate into the realm of illegality the possibilities would be near endless.
I am not going to give any advice on illegality and will not condone or encourage illegal actions, but I would note I do love intellectual challenges and might be willing to engage in hypotheticals for a hefty payment.
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*All numbers are very quick and rough estimates. I’d need to be paid more than nothing for greater accuracy.
